Civilization Watch - October 17, 2004 - The Death of Shame - The Ornery AmericanCivilization WatchFirst appeared in print in The Rhinoceros Times, Greensboro, NC

By Orson Scott Card

October 17, 2004

The Death of Shame

I have been puzzled for some time by the behavior of the Left, not just in
this election but in the past decade.

I watched in fascination during the whole Monica Lewinsky brouhaha, as
Clinton's defenders demanded an absurd degree of proof before they would
accept that Bill was guilty (which, of course, he was), while at the same time
believing instantly and without evidence the most outlandish charges against
Bill's accusers. Didn't they recognize their own absurd double standard?

Then in the campaign of 2000, I became increasingly angry over the truly
vicious lies that were being told to African-American groups about George W.
Bush. The solemn warnings of a return to Jim Crow if Bush were elected made
it sound as if Bush were Strom Thurmond of 1948, when they knew perfectly
well that Bush was one of the few Republicans who actually deserved -- and, in
Texas, got -- a higher than normal percentage of the black vote.

And the Leftist-dominated media, instead of exposing the racially
charged language being used by Gore's supporters -- as they would certainly
have done if a Republican had used identical, but racially reversed, language to
all-white audiences -- let it go on and on virtually unmentioned.

Of course, after nearly four years of Bush's presidency, it should be
obvious to black voters that the terrible warnings they were given in 2000 were
completely false. But the race-baiting is already under way, albeit on a smaller
scale, as the Democrats piously warn of "voter intimidation."

Then in Florida, during the so-called "recount," the Left shamelessly
sprayed out accusations of how the Republicans had "disenfranchised" poor
voters, though in fact all they ever showed was the normal error rate that had
been accepted for many years in elections throughout America -- an error rate
that was always assumed to apply equally to both sides.

In fact, that was the obvious basis of Richard Daley's selective recount
effort on behalf of Gore in Florida. If you only recount the most Democrat-dominated voting precincts, then, by finding the normal number of errors, the
resulting increase in correctly counted ballots will be tilted strongly for the
Democratic candidate.

It was a scam -- which was exposed by Gore's attempt to block the
counting of the absentee ballots of American servicemen from Florida, since it
is well known that the people who volunteer for the military tend to vote two-to-one in favor of the Republican presidential candidate.

And yet the Democrats piously continue to this day to treat the whole
vote-count affair, not as an obvious attempt to steal an election by
manipulating selected groups of ballots, but as some noble attempt to block the
evil Republicans from depriving poor helpless minorities from having their
ballots fairly counted.

The Catalogue of Lies

The falsehoods are thick on the ground, and contrary to the impression
some might try to give you, they are not conducted equally by both sides.

When they trumpet examples of Republican "lies," they usually turn out
to be in the following categories:

1. Statements that turn out to be wrong, though they were believed to be
right at the time they were spoken. (In the rational world, we call these
"mistakes.")

2. Statements that interpret legitimate data in ways that support the
Republican view. (In the rational world, we call these "differences of opinion.")

3. Statements that point out obvious contradictions between what the
Democratic candidates say and what they have said and done in the past.
These are called "negative campaigning" and "mudslinging" and "distortions"
and, of course, "lies," but these countercharges are offered instead of coherent
explanations.

Meanwhile, the Democrats engage in wholesale, flat-out lying, ranging
from Kerry's false charges against America's soldiers in Vietnam, his phony
claims about Christmas in Cambodia and what it was he threw over the fence
when he said they were his medals, to present charges that Bush has blocked
stem-cell research and that if Kerry were president, paralytics would rise up
and walk.

If a Republican had said these things, the media would throw him into
the flames, never letting us forget these ridiculous and contemptible lies for a
second. Instead, we get the ABC News memo that makes it clear that
Republican distortions are to be trumpeted, while Democratic ones are "not
central" and therefore can be ignored.

Intellectual Laziness

All of this can be chalked up to "partisan wrangling," though the Left has
clearly returned to the era of machine politics and demagoguery that for a
while -- indeed, for most of my life -- American presidential candidates and
parties were ashamed to engage in, though it bubbled just under the surface
and, in a few key states, served to steal an election or two.

What most astonishes me, I'm afraid, is at the personal level. The
individual level.

The Left fancies that it has a monopoly on intellectuals. When an online
magazine invites published authors to tell whom they're voting for and why,
out of dozens only four (including me) are voting for Bush. The most
interesting thing is that the four pro-Bush authors offer clear reasons for their
vote, but the pro-Kerry authors spew out invective against Bush or give cute or
clever "reasons" that simply treat the question as being beneath serious
discussion.

I get letters that are endless variations on the same theme: Mr. Card, I
like your books and you seem so wise, but yet you're supporting Bush. Why
don't you look at the evidence and realize that Bush is the devil and Kerry will
save us from the disaster that Bush is leading us toward?

Yet when I choose to answer these letters and ask them to get specific, it
becomes obvious that none -- no, not one -- of these people has actually
examined the evidence at all.

These "intellectuals" show not even the slightest sign of ever having
questioned their own opinions.

Now, I have to regard this as the minimum standard for being regarded
as a genuine intellectual -- that you have questioned your own beliefs and
subjected them to rigorous tests of logic and evidence.

But throughout this entire war and the political talk surrounding it, I
have found exactly one intellectual of the Left (a professor at Appalachian
State) who was actually willing to test his own ideas in the cauldron of reason
and real-world evidence; he and I still reach different conclusions because we
have a different moral worldview, but at least we live in the same rational
universe.

It's the same on the news and entertainment talk shows and in the
intellectual and scholarly magazines. While the Right does not lack for
shallow-thinking spouters of the party line -- one thinks of the ever-vacuous
Sean Hannity -- the intellectual Right still holds itself to rigorous standards of
evidence and reason.

I actually find better reasoning about and evidence in support of the
Leftist point of view, and more skeptical but serious examination of Rightwing
ideas, in magazines like Commentary and The Weekly Standard than I do in
Leftist publications like Harper's and The New Yorker.

What I find from most self-styled "intellectuals" in American public life is
a laziness so profound as to be frightening. These are our opinion leaders and
university professors? Have they forgotten that "the never-doubted opinion is
not worth speaking"?

The Left is above the discussion. They don't need to read contrary views.
The conclusion has been received, the Pope has spoken, the Supreme Court
has decided. Case closed.

The Entitlement to Power

How did American intellectual leadership pass to people who no longer
even go through the motions of rigorous examination of ideas?

It's because they have no shame.

Shame is the innate human need to be thought well of by one's
neighbors. It leads to the concealment of wrongdoing.

It is the motive behind hypocrisy -- the desire to continue to sin without
paying the social penalties of being known to be a sinner.

So when the Left acts hypocritically, one can assume that they do feel
shame, and for years I have made that mistake.

But I no longer believe it. Because the double standards of the Left today
are not prompted by any sense that the lies and misbehavior they are
concealing are wrong, but rather by the fact that the exposure of those lies and
misbehavior would be politically inconvenient.

Indeed, the whole question of right or wrong is irrelevant to the thinking
of the Left.

They speak the language of morality, declaring Bush to be evil (or
variations on that theme), but in fact the Left lives in a moral universe in which
there is only one moral virtue, and here it is:

It is good and right for power to be in the hands of the Left.

All "morality" on the Left and all "reasoning" on the Left flow from this
unspoken axiom.

And it only came up, politically at least, after 1994.

That was the year when Newt Gingrich's brilliant "Contract with America"
strategy wrested control of the U.S. Congress away from the Democrats for the
first time in forty years.

A whole generation of Democrats had grown up with the belief that no
matter what else happened, Democrats legislated and Democrats controlled the
courts. There might be Republican presidents, but they couldn't do anything
without the permission of Congress.

So when the Democrats lost Congress, they began to behave like big
babies. When Republicans did to them what they had done to Republicans in
Congress for forty years, suddenly it was unfair. The world had gone mad. The
ruled-over were suddenly ruling. The Helots were in charge and the Spartans
could not bear it.

Democrats had come to think of themselves as the ruling class.

That is the mindset that explains all the behavior of the Left since 1994.
If they are not in power, then clearly something is deeply, disturbingly wrong
with the world, and any means to restore the proper order of things is perfectly
acceptable.

Why, if Democrats are not in power, then the whole "progressive" agenda
will grind to a halt.

For so many years, Republicans were a nuisance to be swatted away,
except when one of them became president, and even then, Congress, with the
collusion of the media, had mastered the art of harassing a disobedient
president.

But after 1994, when Republicans used congressional investigations to
harass a Democratic President, that was a horrible misuse of power.

Don't Americans understand that the Left is entitled to power?

That's why it's OK to do selective recounts in Florida and try to
disenfranchise American soldiers and sailors -- all the while claiming that it's
the Republicans who are disenfranchising people.

That's why it's OK to filibuster in the Senate in order to block the
president from appointing perfectly qualified judges -- and why it's OK to make
ridiculously false attacks on those judicial appointees.

That's why it's fine for John Kerry to pretend that he'll be tough on
defense even though everybody on the Left is counting on him doing just the
opposite in office -- because any lie that restores the proper order of things is a
good lie.

That's why Kerry and Edwards can lie about Bush's record on stem cell
research and make hilarious and offensive claims that if they are elected, the
crippled will rise up and walk. A Republican making such a claim would
become a complete laughingstock in the media; but if it might sway a single
voter to restore the proper order of things, then the Leftist media dare not to
discredit the claim.

That's why CBS throws journalistic ethics to the wind and runs with a
story about Bush's National Guard service that is based on obviously
fabricated documents. That's why ABC News has no problem with exposing
only "distortions" by Bush and ignoring outright lies by Kerry.

That's why the New York Times prints a story claiming that Bush said, in
a closed meeting, that he plans to "privatize" Social Security -- even though the
word privatize is actually the Left's term, which Bush would never utter, and
Bush's openly stated plan has always been to allow young workers the option
of investing a portion of their Social Security contribution.

There was no news story there at all -- but anything that might scare
senior citizens into panicking and voting for Kerry is worth printing.

That's why lawyers and politicians are already gearing up to attempt to
steal the election after the fact by making false claims about intimidation of
minority voters by evil Republicans -- when they know perfectly well that it's
the Left that is openly using tactics of intimidation.

Like when they sent mobs of union workers to "demonstrate" inside the
small local offices of the Bush campaign in Florida, terrifying a handful of Bush
campaign workers with a Brown-shirt tactic that, if it had been carried out by,
say, NRA members against Kerry headquarters, would now be the biggest story
of the campaign season.

That's why the intellectual Left feels perfectly justified in vilifying,
slandering, scare-mongering, hating, intimidating, and cheating, all the while
claiming a moral superiority.

The only morality that binds them is the result of the election, which
determines whether they are in or out of power. Anything that gets them into
power is "good" and anything that might block that happy result is "evil."

And if the voters see through the deception and the scare tactics and the
race-baiting and the false promises and the smarmy self-righteousness and
vote for the other guy, well, there are teams of lawyers standing by to try to use
the courts to overturn the election results.

It Comes Back to Faith in a Higher Power

The worst thing is that this "morality" seeps down into society as a
whole. We have professional sports where "anything to win" has long since
displaced sportsmanship or following the rules of the game. We have schools
where students and parents will do anything to get the grades that will get the
kids into the right college and therefore a good job, without regard for whether
the student has learned anything or is becoming a decent human being.

I've heard Leftists complain that the thing that scares them most about
George W. Bush is that he thinks he's chosen by God.

But that is not true at all. What Bush believes is that he is accountable
to God. This serves as a check on him; it blocks him from doing anything that
he believes God would not approve of.

Contrary to Leftist myth, he doesn't change his beliefs about God to fit
what he wants to do; he conforms his actions to fit well-established beliefs
about God's will. They mock him for having a black-and-white view of the
world. But look at the result of not having such a view: The lying and cheating
that are now endemic on the Left.

Kerry claims to believe in God, and maybe he does -- but the God he
believes in is one without any requirements. As a result, whatever Kerry's
faith, he can do anything without feeling any shame at all.

Bush believes in a God who has strict rules that he expects his children
to follow -- even presidents who are running for office, and even if following
those rules might make you lose.

If you don't believe that you are ever going to have to account for your
actions except in the highly manipulable court of public opinion, then what is
there to constrain you from abusing power to your own benefit -- which is, by
the way, a good working definition of "evil."

The Left is firmly convinced that good is only possible in the world when
they are in power; therefore they can do any number of unfair, indecent, or
dishonest things in pursuit of that goal.

Without shame. Without guilt.

Because they don't believe there is such a thing as "sin." Only power.
And whoever gets the power, makes the rules. To the Left, the only shameful
act in 2004 is voting Republican.

And if we vote for candidates who show themselves to have no shame,
then we deserve the government that they will give us.